


A Converging Course

by musamihi



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Antagonism, Heroism & Cynicism, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Sharing a Bed, Smuggler Ben Solo, Yavin 4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-14
Updated: 2018-04-14
Packaged: 2019-04-22 19:59:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14316072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musamihi/pseuds/musamihi
Summary: "Who taught you first aid?"  Solo dragged his trousers up again; began to rebuckle his belt.Poe tipped his face up to him, resting his chin on Solo's knee where it was still bent before him, and smiled with all the put-on pleasantry of a recruitment holo.  "You should come to the Resistance," he said, giving Solo's leg a pat on its uninjured face.  "We have med droids."





	A Converging Course

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theLiterator](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theLiterator/gifts).



Ducking between the handlebars of his rented – all right, borrowed – speeder, squinting into the lichen-blue dust that came bursting and billowing at him, flattening his shoulders as he swept into a precipitous gorge about ten meters from intercepting another speeding figure – Poe found himself reflecting that this was, in all likelihood, not what Resistance command had intended when they'd signaled him his most recent orders: _keep your head down._

Sometimes, though, conditions in the field changed. Sometimes, one's primary goal leapt out of reach, and all that was left was grabbing what one could get. Following rumors, credits, and a garbled records trail in search of a Coruscantian philanthropist whose dubious choice of donees might just lead the Resistance to the lurking Imperial remnant that man seemed to favor had dropped Poe _here_ , on this murky, frigid smuggler's outpost in the Churba sector, and here, the hunt ended – for now. The crew which, as far as Poe could tell, had taken custody of the wealth intended for whatever miserable old Grand Moff still clinging to the helm out in stars-knew-where their philanthropist meant to support was too large, too dangerous, too savvy, and too well-armed for him to take on directly. He was to observe this pod of blood-suckers, make note of their members and their fleet, _maybe_ plant a tracking device, if the opportunity presented itself, and then lay low until he could safely and inconspicuously get out of here.

And Poe had observed them. He'd observed them roughing up just about anyone who looked at them wrong. He'd observed them targeting and snatching people – bounty-bearers, probably – and hauling them off with near-impunity into this moon's endless system of glowing fungus-ridden caves. He'd observed them acting like they owned every patch of ground they walked on, every thing and every person they happened to grasp, and it had been impossible not to see that this would be the state of the entire Galaxy, if the Resistance failed in its task. There was a threat out there, a piece of the Empire growing back like a deep-rooted weed, and whatever it called itself, _First Order_ , or _Amaxines_ , or _whatever_ , if it was allowed to flourish, this would be the result. Not another Empire. Just chaos: a universe torn apart enough for the dregs to thrive in the cracks, and make the place their own.

So, if he couldn't punch these guys in the face – he could at least grab them by the tail and given them a nice, hard tug.

Pulling sharply up, he swerved in a meter or two behind the other speeder, watching its aft section fishtail a little, breathing in the ominous acrid scent of its burning electronics. Whoever was riding it was good, _very_ good, but they'd already taken a hit, and there was no way they would ever outrun the nine (Poe thought he'd counted nine) thugs cruising quickly up behind them. Poe didn't know who the quarry was, this person tearing desperately away on a damaged bike. But he knew: he was going to help them. If the pack of drukheads on their tail wanted this fugitive, then Poe was going to make damn sure they came away empty handed.

It was probably just some sap with bad debt and a bounty, anyway. Or maybe a thief who'd stolen from the wrong villains – in which case, Poe would be all too happy to offer his congratulations. 

The wounded speeder took a dive, and Poe's heart leapt into his throat, but there was no crash – and so he followed, veering blindly down into a rush of warmer, clammy air. He heard the other speeder stutter, its engine go silent and its hover cells start squealing with effort. He pulled up beside it, lurching forward in his seat, and extended his arm to the other rider – tall, humanoid, probably male, hard to tell in the wraps and goggles and masks everyone here wore against the surface chill, the subterranean damp, and the omnipresent spores. "Get on," he barked. "Hurry."

His new friend didn't hesitate. Poe's speeder sagged a little as the man climbed aboard, one arm hooking tightly around Poe's waist as the other jabbing up toward his face, and Poe had a fraction of a second to wonder what exactly he was doing before the chemical stench made his head jerk back – and it was too late, and everything went black.

* * *

Poe dragged in a breath, waking to damp and an alarming darkness – until he rolled over, sputtering as he settled onto his back on the cave floor and its alternately sharp and spongey ridges, and stared into the dimly phosphorescent scene around him. Unfamiliar cave stretched out in both directions, and –

And there was his tall, humanoid, probably male ungrateful _son of a charnoq_ , about to climb on Poe's rented (borrowed) speeder. The other bike's useless wreck was nowhere to be seen. "No," Poe coughed, wincing – his throat burned, and the taste of whatever he'd inhaled right before slipping under still floated in the back of his mouth. "No, you're not –"

He shoved himself to his feet, pushing aside the dizziness that threatened to envelop him and only _almost_ slipping to his knees again as he staggered toward the man – human man, broad, dark hair that glowed blue in this passage, irritated twist to his mouth – who clearly intended to leave him here to his own devices. 

"Just keep your hand on the right wall," the man said, settling back into the speeder's seat and beginning to wind his scarf once again around his face, "and head that way." His voice was flat, oddly soft – and carried an unmistakable note of vexation. As though stealing a speeder and dumping its driver was a dreadful inconvenience. "You'll be fine."

"I _helped_ you." Poe seized the speeder's rear stabilizer bar – more for balance than out of any hope he might be able to hold it back. 

The man tapped at the fuel gauge on the speeder's console, and made a disapproving little noise. "I didn't ask you to."

"So – you're just going to leave me here for those crooks to find? After I shook them for you?"

"I doubt they'll bother about you. All you're worth is a First Order bounty," he drawled, switching on the engine. "I checked. And they're not really known for paying without a hassle."

"You're a bounty hunter." Maybe it had been a mistake, saving him from his fellow scumbags. In retrospect, anyone those lowlifes found worth chasing to the tune of nine riders probably wasn't up to much good. Still. 

"No." The man shrugged. "But I checked."

"So you know who I am. And you know who'll pay to get me back."

He scoffed. "They're even _worse_. I know who you are." He turned to stare down the long angle of his nose directly at Poe, his dark eyes gleaming in the low light with something that looked almost like defiance. "And I know why you're actually here. So you can drop the act. And when you get back – _if_ you get back – you can tell my mother: I'm not interested."

Poe blinked at him, leaning more heavily on the bike. That little speech had been delivered with the gravity and flair of someone who meant his words to hit home, but they failed to make impact. Act? He felt himself frowning, and tried to straighten it out, kneading his fingertips into his forehead as though to address his (very real) headache. "What are you – sorry, who?"

The man on the bike drew up ever so slightly, his shoulders squaring and his brow knitting suddenly – surprise, but, Poe thought, more than that: _affront._ As though Poe had committed some offense in failing to recognize him with his face half-covered and no non-fungal light-sources in the vicinity. What kind of on-the-run smuggler riffraff had the kind of ego that could possibly prompt an expectation of that kind of –

"Oh." Poe swallowed, sagging a little; the bike sunk gently with him. "Shit."

Ben Solo pinned him with a withering glare. "Don't pretend that isn't why you're here."

"It's not." Was it? No – General Organa didn't send him anywhere blind. Nor did she waste Dameron-quality manpower on non-essential missions, if he did say so himself. "I had no idea you'd –"

The engine revved; Poe jumped back, but only for a moment. He couldn't let this bike speed away – he grabbed onto that bar with both hands, bracing to be torn from his feet. But Solo's foot only twitched on the pedal, lingering here – for now.

"I didn't come for you," Poe repeated, gritting his teeth against the throb echoing through his head with every echo of the engine against the close-set cave walls. "I didn't. But now you _really_ can't leave me here. If I get picked up, and I _will_ , or if I die before I ever crawl out of this kriffing maze, your mother's going to have a lot more to deal with than where her son's slumming it this week. You can't leave me here." He hardly trusted himself to walk another kilometer, never mind successfully steer himself back to fresh air and natural light. 

Solo's foot gave another twitch – and, to Poe's great relief (which he failed utterly to conceal, his sigh puffing the fabric of his wrap out from his face), he climbed off the bike. "Arms out."

"Oh, come on –"

"Arms _out._ "

Poe threw his arms out, his dusty jacket tugging across his chest, and he suffered Solo's search with as good a humor as he could muster, considering this was the man responsible for the fact that his skull felt like it was a couple sizes too small. "You couldn't have done this while I was unconscious?"

"Give me your blaster."

"I _helped_ you –"

"People change their minds." Solo unhooked Poe's holster himself, hefting the blaster in his palm and turning to secure it in the bike's front storage compartment. "All the time."

Poe gave his head a toss, his jaw set. "Not me."

"That," Solo replied, swinging one leg over the speeder, "makes you even more dangerous. Get on." He glanced back to where Poe was clambering gracelessly onto the rear seat, his expression difficult to read, half-obscured as it was. "And hold on. If you fall, I am _not_ circling back."

* * *

Like everyone else on this moon, Solo was a transient visitor; unlike everyone else, or at least everyone with sense, he'd found his accommodations not in the one half-habitable city on the surface, but in the cracked network of dripping caves below. Having left the operational speeder in a reasonably protected hiding spot, they ascended through a (defensible, Poe was forced to admit, but _highly_ unpleasant) low-ceilinged series of switchbacks to his position – and Poe had barely stumbled through the jagged doorway when he came up short, face to face with another wall. At his feet were a heavy comms panel, the kind more commonly seen in the console of a ship, and a bedroll, old military issue.

He sank onto the bedroll, leaning back and shutting his eyes. A flow of dry (drier) air spoke to a hidden opening to the surface, but he was too exhausted to explore even this cramped space – whatever Solo had used to knock him out, it was hanging over him like a bad week. When he finally looked up again, at the shuffle of the comms panel being jostled into place, he found Solo crouching over its display, casting him a look of irritation over his shoulder. Poe was beginning to wonder whether he had another expression.

"Make yourself at home," Solo groused, before turning to his work.

"Oh, sorry," Poe said, stretching his legs out as far as they would go – which still left his knees bent. "You're right. I'll take the couch." That garnered no response at all, and so he pressed on, leaning to one side to attempt to see what Solo was calling up on that panel. "We sleep better than this, you know. With the Resistance. I'm not saying it's always comfortable, but – it's better than this." Secrecy mandated temporary bases on out-of-the-way worlds, when they established something planet-side at all – although the Resistance was growing less and less secret by the day, its purpose too pressing to be buried for long from those in the New Republic forces who would need to make a choice.

Everyone, in fact, would be faced with that same choice – and that _this_ was the one General Organa's son had made perplexed him entirely. There were lives easier than being a soldier, but this hardly seemed like one of them. Making one's vocation out of slipping around the law for purely financial gain (and, it must be noted, apparently not much of it) was a conventional enough path, of course, though Poe would never understand it, nor could he ever have tolerated something so empty and so mired in self-service. But for _this_ man to have chosen it … It baffled him.

And it saddened him. Not just for Leia, and her inevitable fear, her certain disappointment. For him, too – the inheritor of a legacy Poe knew all too well and which was his most treasured possession. He couldn't imagine being cut off from that, scurrying down literal holes in the ground, forced to stoop and wade through mire to escape it. It would be like running form the sun: it made no sense at all.

"My next pick-up's in the Belsmuth Sector," Solo said after some time; his work at the panel had been silent, producing no more than a few gentle, muffled clicks. " We'll need to wait til night cycle to get to my ship. Five hours – maybe six. And then I'll drop you there." He turned again, so Poe could see a sliver of his face; and there, again, was that ever-present sneer. "Hope you like the Outer Rim."

"Love it. I know just the place." The first stroke of luck in a long and pointless mission: at least he could get a ride _home_. "Drop me on Yavin 4. It's not that far."

"That's at least a day out of the –"

"I know the Traffic & Customs guys. Tell your pick-up to drop your cargo there – I'll get you in and out, no questions. For your trouble. That's worth a detour, right? Save yourself some time on whatever half-assed scheme you had cooked up to get you out of Belsmuth clean. Let's face it," he continued, well after he probably should have shut his mouth, "getaways don't really seem like your strong suit."

Poe took Solo's wordless turn back to his comms panel as an assent – because, really, there wasn't much other choice. He'd screwed up _keeping his head down_ , so getting home and signaling that he'd managed to extricate himself from his own mess was a decent second choice. A couple days to dig into General Organa's son, who was absolutely nothing like Poe had imagined he might be, was a nice chaser, too, although judging by the number of words he'd spoken since they'd met, that was going to be like pulling teeth. Nothing came easy, it seemed; not this time. Poe's eyes wandered over his hunched figure, the dragged-back mess of his hair, his silhouette, indistinct in the glow, square and large, the glistening patch on the side of his thigh where his trousers stuck to his –

Poe cleared his throat. His voice was slowly coming back to itself. "Did you know you're bleeding?"

"No," Solo replied, with just enough lilt in his voice to underscore the trimantium-weight scrape of his dead-dry sarcasm. "I hadn't noticed."

"I'm just trying to help, man."

"I know. You've been very clear about that. You've helped me so much that I have to share a bedroll _and_ go all the way to Yavin kriffing 4." Solo stood, running his hand gingerly down his leg, stopping at the bloodied rip in his trousers with barely a flicker of pain across his face. He unhooked his belt, pressing his shoulders against the wall where it sloped into the too-confining ceiling, and Poe immediately began digging around the bedroll for the emergency supply pouch he knew would be there – and found it, and dug out the disinfectant spray and the bacta patches. There was so little room between them that he hardly even had to reach to set his hand on Solo's leg; to peer as closely as he could at the wound.

"Not deep," he announced. "Not all that dirty. Do you want –"

"Just do it. You might as well make yourself useful. _Actually_ useful."

With a huff and something halfway between a nod and a shake of his head, Poe set to his work – quick, uncomplicated stuff, but the quarters were close, his hands were shaking, his mind was sluggish, and the fauna was no substitute for a lamp, and so the end result was, while passable, not as comfortable as it might have been. He refrained from apologizing for the sting, the rough handling, and the inexpert placement of the bacta patch that required him to apply it, disengage it with a sympathetic grimace, and apply it again.

"Who taught you first aid?" Solo dragged his trousers up again; began to rebuckle his belt.

Poe tipped his face up to him, resting his chin on Solo's knee where it was still bent before him, and smiled with all the put-on pleasantry of a recruitment holo. "You should come to the Resistance," he said, giving Solo's leg a pat on its uninjured face. "We have med droids."

The sound just audible from the back of Solo's throat might have been a laugh; it was hard to tell. His head tilted, and his shoulders made a fraction of an abortive roll, and there was something so tentative and flustered in that set of gestures that Poe was struck with the incongruous impression: _sweet_.

Poe didn't complain when they bunked down in the near-darkness, sleep having presented itself as by far the best use of an empty five or six hours for both of them – he didn't complain, even when he was granted only roughly a quarter of the bedroll, leaving one of his shoulder blades to lie flat on the uneven rock. He didn't remark upon Solo's willingness, unusual in a man in his line of work, to shut his eyes and rest in the presence of a stranger. And, though he was deeply tired, he didn't fall asleep – he waited, instead, until Solo's breathing had evened, and then another half an hour more. And then he rolled, quietly, slowly, toward that silent comms panel. Using the Resistance's emergency frequencies on unknown equipment wasn't a great plan, but the circumstances, he was sure, merited an exception. He keyed in the code, holding his breath at every quiet _click_ , and began to send his identifier, one sequence, two –

And then there was a hand at the back of his neck, twisting into his jacket, his shirt, and dragging him bodily back from the machine with a distressing lack of effort. Solo seized him around the waist and rolled him, easily, to the other side of the bedroll, jammed between the cave wall and his captor. Poe made an indignant sound when he felt a pair of restraints contract around his wrists where they were pinned at his back.

"You're a real asshole, Solo," he said, his face pressed up against a fleshy, glowing mushroom cluster.

"There you go." For the first time, there was a certain measure of satisfaction in Solo's voice. "Try to remember that next time."

* * *

"There!" Poe shouted, jabbing toward a the briefest gleam at their two o'clock, even as he felt the yacht begin to veer – as though he had been flying it, as though it had responded to his own muscular impulses, rather than to the hands of a man whose instincts seemed in so many ways to be singularly contrary to his own. "At –"

"I see it," Solo snapped back, and while his voice was quiet enough almost to be subsumed beneath the ship's proximity alarms, shield alerts, and spooling guns, there was an unmistakable brittleness there, as though one more push would turn that volume up considerably. "I see all of it, you don't have to –"

His protestations were cut off by another impact and resulting shimmy, another hit, one in a chain of blows that Poe was trying not to think of as _accumulating_ , as they finally broke free of the atmosphere into which they'd taken off so unceremoniously only moments ago, chased off-world well before flight checks were complete by the same guys who'd hounded them down into the caves the day before. They'd be fine, Poe knew. He thought. He was pretty sure. Solo's yacht was well-equipped, in the way a Resistance fighter or, indeed, most New Republic pilots could only ever dream of, well on the wrong side of legal, and outfitted with a creativity that made Poe feel a glimmer of something like kinship. Had he had this kind of leeway to spread his wings, well, who knew: maybe he'd have developed a knack for these ornamental flairs, these little strokes of functional genius. For many reasons, hardware modifications had never been where he'd invested his time; but there was an allure there, an attractive sheen of possibility and - call it what it was - speed.

Not that this was really the time to become engrossed in appreciation of anyone's mechanical panache. The most virtuosic of technical hands, the most conniving smugglers, none of them could beat a catastrophic decompression. And if they took another shot to their aft quarter –

 _Behind that satellite,_ he was about to say, when Solo swept onto that course precisely, taking them into the shadow of a hurtling hunk of metal for just long enough for the weapons to signal with a relatively demure _beep_ : they were online.

Poe wasted a fraction of a second staring. This guy was good. _Almost_ as good as –

"Weapons," Poe prompted, slanting a glance toward the pilot, his hands gripping the edge of his seat to keep himself from seizing _something_ , anything. Solo could shift weapons control over to the co-pilot's console if he wanted to – it was the sensible option, in this scenario, when they were bare kilometers ahead of a band of thieves who seemed intent on chasing Solo over land and through space, and he had access to a spare set of hands.

Solo's mouth twisted; he said nothing. The shadow of the satellite passed, exposing them once more to the distant, grey light of the far-away sun – and the fire of a team of good-for-nothings who had already once succeeded in shooting Solo into hiding, a fact which Poe realized it might be imprudent, at the moment, to raise.

"These guys have shot you down once already," he said, letting his chair swivel to face Solo fully. "I don't know what you think the worst case scenario here is, but I promise, it's not –"

"So shut _up_ and shoot," Solo grumbled, hitting the toggle on the console that finally allowed Poe's controls to light up. 

Without another word, Poe was on them, sinking into the intense focus that was the intersection between an unfamiliar cockpit and an enemy force that covered a clean hundred and eighty degrees of the radar. By the time he'd scared away most of the little junkers breathing most immediately down their necks, he couldn't really have said how long it had been – maybe seconds, maybe a minute – but in the moment in which he came up for air, he marveled at the easy sync between Solo's gait (as Poe thought of it – the stance and posture and movement and style that defined a way of flying as surely as the peculiarities of walking) and his own. He was by no means accustomed to coordinating a firefight with someone else at the helm, and this had been easy. It might have been a pleasure, had the circumstances not been so dire.

Well – it was a pleasure, anyway. And he was almost – almost - disappointed when space dissolved around them, and they jumped.

* * *

Ben shut his eyes – not for long, just a quick, purposeful flutter – as he executed their jump to hyperspace. It was a feeling he cherished, one he'd always chased, not quite like the high of pulling Gs and blasting out of the goo, but more visceral, somehow deeper. The way he felt the universe itself fall away, connections falter and sensations fade – it was the one moment in which he could truly experience the emptiness in which he so fervently believed; which he so urgently craved. It was never a palpable truth until - _now_.

And it slipped away as quickly as it came on. A different rush of life and sound and presence flooded in once the ship reached its constant velocity. And most prominent among them now, of course, was Dameron. He'd have been as unmistakable, as transparent, as deafening to anyone as he was to Ben, surely; it wasn't enough that he was brimming over with laser-sharp intensity, enough to shatter plasteel, no – no, he had to let out an actual, vocal _whoop_ as the jump smoothed out and away.

Ben might have resented him for ruining his moment, had Dameron not _also_ been practically glittering with something that felt enticingly like – approval. Admiration. It was a quality almost as appealing as the yawning chasm of a desolate void.

"What did you do to those bastards, anyway?" Dameron kicked back in his seat, pulling off harnesses at impressive speed. "They do _not_ like you."

"I took their money." Obviously. More or less. Nothing heroic; nothing like what Dameron, he didn't doubt, was earnestly hoping for. Ben could feel that, too, as clearly as he felt the skitter and glow of Dameron's nerves in the ebbing aftermath of their lightning-quick skirmish. He attempted to ignore it in favor of investigating a momentary stall the navcomp had suffered while calculating their final jump coordinates. Just a glitch, most likely. Interference from a rushed blast through the corrosive air, and from his pursuer's fire and comms jamming. 

Even the potential of a true loss of navigational systems was less unsettling than the prospect of where his univinted copilot's course of thought would lead him. He believed Dameron, now, that he wasn't on a mission from his mother – but he suspected that Dameron was the sort to generate his own mission, whenever circumstances allowed. The very last thing Ben wanted was someone concocting some ignorant, misguided picture of the son of Leia Organa, and beginning to employ it to their own purposes. He had very intentionally fled from that likelihood, a near certainty. He had glimpsed its inevitable consequences. And he had built his own alternative, one he intended to pursue undaunted by the false grandeur of his mother's cause.

Even if, more often than not, it landed him on hellholes in the Churba sector, and in the company of decidedly perplexing people, whom he was tempted to follow for reasons he ought to have known were not good ones. The way Dameron was looking at him now, his grin with its shamelessly open signs of fascination, the interest and the slow recalculation in his eyes, should have been off-putting rather than tantalizing.

Should have.

Ben turned his face back to the mottled black beyond the viewscreen, and tried to focus past their reflections, on vacuum.

* * *

He'd traded out one humid backwater hellhole for another: the light was different here, that was all. On Yavin 4, the gloom was green. Ben's hair still clung to his forehead; his shirt still stuck to his sides. The space beneath the Massassi canopy was expansive, but no less oppressive than those close-drawn caves. 

You wouldn't know it to watch Dameron, speeding before him like a fish in water. He'd been true to his word thus far – for Ben's agreement to bring him here, he'd arranged for both Ben's yacht and his cargo to make it through the moon's atmospheric controls without incident, and legitimate permits to haul, a rare luxury in this business, had been secured and delivered. So when he'd offered to guide Ben to the cargo drop site, Ben had agreed. This was his home turf, after all, and the sooner he got off this mossy, vine-strangled, bird-ridden mud clump, the better.

And then – he could sense that Dameron didn't mean him harm. The man had a deeply distorted view of him, of his family, of the universe at large – but he was misguided, myopic, not malevolent. Ben's most pressing worry for this ride out into the jungle was that Dameron would try to force a conversation. The thought of that wasn't entirely unbearable, of course – he was cocky, yes, and self-righteous, but there was an openness about him that even Ben could find almost, _almost_ easy. He didn't contain many surprises, aside from the unhappily powerful effect of his bright-white smile in the dark combined with the warmth of his hand, but that had been easily shaken off, and it wasn't like he'd thought about it at all during their jump, three days of close quarters and catching glimpses of –

"What is this?" Ben pulled back on his throttle, because Dameron had; the forest was thinning, and on the tree-tattered horizon loomed a hulking stone shape riddled with weed and volunteer saplings.

But he knew what it was. It had featured prominently in his family lore, a story he'd heard a hundred times if he'd heard it twice. He had never seen it, but he knew it. His jaw set, anger starting in his chest.

Dameron wasn't devoid of surprises, after all. To be fair, this one shouldn't have come as a shock. "This," Ben said, trying to sound unbothered, an effort which simply made him sound stiff, "is not the drop site."

"No." Dameron looked back at him, dropping one foot to the earth. "It's –"

"I know what it is." Ben revved his engine again; his feet stayed firmly on the pedals. "It's even more of a dump than I'd heard. Let's go."

Dameron's face hardened. "A _dump_ -"

"Yes. It's a ruined temple in the middle of a forest I can only assume doubles as an insect reserve, and if there was ever anything interesting about it, it's already been packed off to the museum on Chandrila, which I've been dragged to – I don't even _know_ how many times. Probably not as many times as you've treated yourself to it, though. Let me guess: you have a membership."

This was clearly not the reaction Dameron had expected, which gave Ben a perverse sort of satisfaction, even if the heightening color in Dameron's face and the pain evident in his angry speechlessness was oddly disagreeable.

"What did you think?" Ben pressed on, jerking his head toward the temple. "We'd swing by, and I'd see this, and suddenly I'd remember my deep-seated commitment to preserving the safety and virtue of the galaxy?"

Silence. "I thought you should see it," Dameron said, at last, his voice strangely quiet, and flooded, absolutely flooded with an intolerable depth of wounded devotion, "because it's _important._ "

"No. It isn't." Ben could see that Dameron believed it, though – he could hear it, he could _feel_ it. He felt bad for him, almost – no, he did. He felt bad for him. It was undeniably sweet. It was incontrovertibly sad. "Of course you would think it was. I can see why you would. My mother –"

"You've spent your entire _life_ in a galaxy secured by the people who fought here. Don't you know that? The universe you've grown up in, the safety you've enjoyed, the choice you've had – how can you say that?" Dameron could go from zero to _oration_ in about five seconds; a neat trick. "What they've done for you, for all of us – if you choose to repay them by breaking the law and grabbing a few credits here and there selling contraband, that's _your_ business," although his tone of voice made it very clear that he did not, in fact, think this was true, "but you could have some respect. You could have a _little_ respect."

Ben leaned on his handle bars. A fly buzzed past his ear; the corner of his mouth twitched. "You do believe that," he said, almost kindly. "And I know why. But it isn't true, you know. None of this is as important as you think it is. As _she_ thinks it is. It matters to you. And not just you. But to say that they secured the galaxy …" It was such a small place these people lived in – politicians, soldiers. "Security is an illusion. The galaxy – there are pieces of it, _large_ pieces, where nothing my mother has ever done, nothing the Empire or the Rebellion or the Republic has ever touched, has mattered at all. You think this history, these struggles, are at the center of everyone's universe. They're not. Law doesn't matter. Order doesn't matter. These wars – they don't matter. Not to the vast, _vast_ bulk of the universe." The arrogance to think that such a thing as order, an ideal, or even truth could really exist, or that one could impose it on reality – it was so entirely antithetical to the way the universe moved around him; to the way he could feel it touch and connect and exist with him. "And not to me."

"And what _is_ important?" Dameron demanded without missing a beat. "If not that?"

Ben shrugged. "You don't get to choose for everyone what's most important – what's worth dying for –"

"But it has to be _something_." Ben hadn't expected this kind of heat from Dameron, who had seemed, while dedicated, so coolly composed in their first meetings. "You don't just get to choose, in a vacuum, that you're going to care about _this_ , and not _that_ , and act like it doesn't affect other people, because it _does_. It has to be something. Not – not _money._ "

"Of course it can be money." A disingenuous retort – mostly because it stung a little that Dameron would think _that_ was what he cared about. Hadn't he been listening? "Why not? Money does more for most of the galaxy than you ever will. Than she ever has." He swallowed back the anger in his throat that was threatening to make him say quite a lot more that he didn't mean. "You know – I'm fine on my own. I can find the site. I'll leave the speeder there for you." He waved toward the temple, a grand sweep of his arm. "But _you_ enjoy your tour."

He tore away. And if he felt, a few minutes later, a burst of something like dismay that felt very much like Dameron, he had no reason to think it was anything but more ideological anger; he had no reason to suspect they had been followed.

* * *

Ben hung in orbit over Yavin 4, waiting for his clearance to leave the gravity well. All had gone as promised: no trouble from customs, no searches, no nothing. Dameron had done his part. It would have been better, Ben knew, if they had gone their separate ways under less spectacular circumstances. Whatever Dameron would tell his mother now, it was likely to cause trouble for him – more than might have been invited by a friendly good-bye. 

There was more than that, too. It rankled – it infuriated him, the way he'd felt under Dameron's miserable, disapproving gaze. That look on anyone's face, it should never have mattered to him, not at all – he should feel nothing under its scrutiny but the knowledge that what he said was true. His mother's disappointment, and Dameron's, should have invoked in him no more than perhaps a little pity at their inability to understand their own insignificance. Their place in the grander scheme of things. The universe as it _truly_ was.

And yet.

He keyed up the file on Dameron's bounty again, scanning through the list of his offenses. This was, without a doubt, the record of a man who thought himself unwaveringly correct, who risked his life for what he believed without once stopping to consider that what he believed might not be true, or might only be a fragment of the truth. It was the record of the sort of man Ben had very intentionally tried to flee when he had chosen to go off on his own. It was –

 _Oh._ Well - _now_ , it was the record of a man whose bounty had been claimed, apparently. The bright red _AT LARGE_ beneath Dameron's face had been replaced with a blue _PENDING._

Ben let out a rush of breath. He muttered an oath. He drummed his fingers on the console, hunching over that shimmering display, staring into that insufferably confident, disquietingly attractive face.

And, with a complaining sigh, he began to sift through his contacts for a slicer. A ship fencer. A forger. All the distasteful and expensive people who would make this already wildly impractical and unadvisable whim even more complicated, even more of a very, very bad idea. 

_Damn it._

* * *

The bounty hunter scanned the credit chit; she nodded. Turning sharply on her heel, she marched down the boarding ramp of the First Order shuttle, leaving behind an officer in gleaming regulation black, his hands clasped just so behind his back, his striking face a mask of dull duty – and a prisoner, kneeling on the deck, his wrists bound, his lip split, one eye swollen shut. Transaction: complete. Somewhere in the non-existent space of the dark holonet, Poe Dameron's First Order bounty ticked over from _PENDING_ to _COLLECTED_.

The ramp rose and shut. Ben waited until it had latched and armed to tug at the collar digging into the bottom of his jaw. A stolen uniform, sadly, was never a _perfect_ fit.

"You look terrible," Dameron croaked from somewhere down around his hip. "Just awful. Doesn't suit you."

"Hm." Ben looked down at him, his gaze lingering on the unsightly bruise above Dameorn's cheekbone. "You look fantastic."

Dameron laughed – coughed – somewhere in between those two poles – and Ben stooped to grip his elbow and help him to his feet. Dameron leaned on him, angling enough of his weight against Ben's arm that Ben had to shift, pressing against him, holding him up along the line of his body from his knee to his shoulder. And it felt – strange, for a moment. There was a flutter of fear behind his ribs, but a deep gratification, too. To feel the ease with which Dameron simply fell against him, unhesitating, trusting, natural – and the effortlessness with which Ben held him up, an act which should have been fraught and uncomfortable and burdensome, but which was only – good. It frightened him a little, and confused him, but what he could feel rolling off Dameron was nothing but gratitude and fatigue and – unfortunately – a sense of happy vindication that Ben knew was bound to be disappointed.

Dameron thought this meant something – about Ben. About the universe. He was wrong; on those counts, he was wrong. And he would discover that, sooner or later, to his inevitable displeasure. Ben found he dreaded it.

But for now – he could indulge, couldn't he? There was no harm in that. "Here," he said, leaning Dameron back against a bulkhead and reaching down to disengage his restraints. "You should go strap in. We need to get out of here before anyone figures this out."

Dameron chafed at his wrists, and then hooked his fingers into the broad, stiff belt at Ben's waist. "Thank you," he said, his face positively painfully earnest, his eyes – well, his eye – heavy lidded, soft with something Ben couldn’t even bear to think about. When Dameron craned up to kiss him, Ben bent to meet him, a clumsy arch of his neck in this blasted collar, his heart pounding with the unhappy thought that this could not possibly last; but some of that anxiety leached out of him as they stood there, pressed together, Dameron's presence solid and warm and indefatigable. He was not, Ben sensed, someone who could be easily swatted away.

That ought to have worried him. It did – a little. But there was something indulgent, too, about being in the presence of someone who so obstinately assumed the best - he found he was a bit greedy for it. It fed something in him which he liked to think of as selfish. It pleased him to bask in it, as long as he didn't think too far forward. Dameron leaned on him, and he _liked_ it, and it made him hungry for more of that, whatever that was - and that was all. That was all it needed to be. Surely.

"I'm not kidding," Dameron said, after a few long beats, tugging at that belt. "I fucking hate the way this looks. I can't look at this. You need to get out of it."

Ben scoffed. "I think you can wait. Go – strap in." He turned Dameron carefully by the shoulders, directing him to the passenger cabin. "I'll come back once we've jumped."

And from there – he didn't know, really, where he would go. But he could feel the gravity of it, whatever it was, pulling at him already, preparing to snag him into its orbit.


End file.
